


masterpieces serving maximum sentences

by blackwood (transjon)



Series: they keep trying to row away [4]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Abuse, Belly Rubs, Captivity, Dark, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dehumanization, Do Not Archive (The Magnus Archives), Gen, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide attempts, MerMay, Mild Blood, Monsters, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Consensual Touching, Sadism, Torture, Victim Blaming, vague medical examination
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:49:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24077002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transjon/pseuds/blackwood
Summary: If Elias had gotten Jon so he could touch him he would be taxidermied by now.–Jon is hurt. Elias cares for him.
Series: they keep trying to row away [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1735714
Comments: 20
Kudos: 163





	masterpieces serving maximum sentences

**Author's Note:**

> title is from all the rowboats by regina spektor.
> 
> this is pretty much immediately after the first fic i wrote for this series and references it a bunch, so probably read that first. hopefully now i can REST that i have gotten whatever the fuck this is out of my head. 
> 
> read the tags PLEASE for the love of god this is very extremely fucked up. 
> 
> tldr elias turns jon into a merman and keeps him captive and also is evil about it. lmk if you feel like there should be more tags. 
> 
> thank you to the Gang. sparrow i appreciate your efforts to make jon feel better. i will continue to make him suffer.

By the time Elias fishes (and isn’t that wonderful, the phrasing – Jon doesn’t appreciate it when Elias makes note of it, teeth baring in a scowl, but then again it’s been a while since he’s been able to appreciate any turn of phrase the way he used to) Jon out of the tank he’s been curled up in a little ball for the better part of an hour. Elias has half the mind to leave him there, sinking towards the bottom, droopy fins brushing the rocks, but there are only so many chances he gets to touch him, these days. 

Not that it’s the main attraction of having him – If Elias had gotten Jon so he could touch him he would be taxidermied by now. Getting to touch him is just a bonus. 

“Careful,” he says mildly when the man holding onto the net almost drops it and Jon with it. Jon struggles, tail getting caught in the netting with the careless thrash of it. It scrapes against his scales in a way that has to be quite painful, Elias knows. Surely he won’t hurt himself too much, though, he thinks. Functionally skinning himself just to get back at Elias is hardly a smart move. It’s been a while since he last caught him slamming himself against the glass, and he’s almost certain he’s over that particular phase of acclimating to this tank by now.

Just as Elias guessed, Jon stills, finally, body curling into a ball again, protective of his vulnerable, soft stomach. When he is dragged towards the platform he goes boneless, the water resistance slowing his drifting. 

“Faster, if you’d please,” Elias snaps, and the man – Lukas, maybe, or perhaps Henry; hard to keep track of them, considering how fast he goes through them, these days – exhales sharply. He does pick up the speed, though, biceps flexing, and then Jon’s body thuds against the edge of the platform. That has happened enough times that Elias knows it can’t have hurt him. Maybe shook him a bit, but certainly not hurt. He’s resilient, his boy. 

Elias watches as they lift him up onto the examination table set up in the center of the platform. Usually when he has to be moved like this – for medical treatment, for check ups, to be shown off, whatever the reason might be – he struggles, and Elias has to remind him to behave. Once, he’d bit into a deceptively sharp leaf and it’d sliced the corners of his mouth clean open, and he’d struggled the whole way up, the whole way onto the examination table, and when he’d knocked over the veterinarian Elias had paid so much to just come see him with a careless swipe of his muscular tail he’d finally had to sedate him. 

Today, he’s still and quiet. His gills flare in a half-hearted attempt to get oxygen into his blood as anxiety and fear pass over his face, but his body doesn’t move. 

“Aren’t you a sweetheart?” Elias murmurs, one hand trailing down his jaw, over his soft gills (and when the fingers of his hand brush over them Jon only twitches a little bit, the slits opening and closing fast and desperate under his finger, the gape of them beautiful and lovely right there, right where he can see inside, watch them twitch as he tries futilely to breathe) and then down his shoulder, his jutting ribs, his waist, and then the transition from scale-peppered skin to his tail; all muscle where the upper part of his body is mostly bone. 

Contrasts, Elias thinks. He has always loved contrast. Plenty of that he’s found in Jon. 

Even on this table, gills working around nothing, going red and raw with the dry oxygen filtering through them, body trying to hold onto it fruitlessly, he tries to curl in on himself. Fascinating creature, Elias thinks. Fascinating. 

His belly is round and distended where the rest of him is so thin, and therein lies the problem, Elias knows. “Oh, Jon,” he says. “What _happened_ to you.”

Of course he knows – has known – what’s the matter. That part is irrelevant. It’s also almost entirely rhetorical, as a question, and instead of waiting for any kind of an answer or looking at his face, Elias, with his eyes fixed on the bulge of his stomach, gloves up, and then places his hands on each side of his ribcage.

Flipping him over is easy. He’s light enough that moving him in this capacity is no problem, especially to Elias, who is strong enough that carrying Jon wasn’t a problem to him even when he was still well-fed. Or, rather, as well-fed as he’d kept himself as a human – he’d never been big – scrawny little thing, living off of endless take-away leftovers and coffee. Regardless, when Elias flips him onto his back he goes easily enough, even if he blatantly wants to curl into a tight ball instead. 

There are a lot of ways Elias could give his poor gills relief – he’d had something custom made, a system that cycles oxygenated water in through his mouth and out through his gills like an oxygen mask, but the mess really is horrible, liters and liters of water going in through his mouth and flooding out of his gills on both sides of the table, getting Elias’ clothes wet. Sometimes it makes his gills bleed, as well, if he doesn’t get it on fast enough, and the blood is hard to scrub out of the concrete. 

Jon hasn’t yet died, and Elias is at this point sure he won’t. Sometimes you have to take a little discomfort. 

And speaking of discomfort – 

Elias’ hands travel down his torso, cupping and testing the give of the flesh. “Would you rather I don’t make sure you’re healthy?” he asks when he notices Jon watching him; his dark, inhuman eyes tracking every moment, the flare of his gills fast and irregular. “I have to make sure nothing’s wrong with you. You know that.”

Jon looks away. He twitches, still, displeased and upset, when Elias scrapes a fingernail absently over the spots on his sides where scales have come off of him, bloody, raw marks deep in his flesh. 

“You really ought to be more careful, Jon,” he says lightly. “These could get infected.”

Jon, predictably, doesn’t say anything. Elias can’t help himself, then, his blood-speckled finger moving to brush over Jon’s lips, light as a feather. “See what you’ve done to yourself? I’m very disappointed in you, you know. You know better.”

Jon closes his eyes, and then, thinking better of it, opens them again. Elias pets the curve of his jaw, the sharp jut of his cheekbone, and then he slides his hand back down his body – throat, chest, and –

When he experimentally presses on the soft, giving flesh of Jon’s belly he screams. 

The sound takes Elias by surprise. He hadn’t thought he was still capable of that; of screaming, that is. He still clicks and wails and cries, he can hear him plenty well enough, through the walls of the tank, through the walls of his house, anywhere at all he finds himself sitting or standing, but this scream, as animalistic and primal it is, is more human than any other sound he’s heard from Jon in a very long time now. 

“Settle down,” Elias snaps, and presses down again, with more intent this time, “I’m not going to ask you again.”

Tears bead in Jon’s eyes. Elias doesn’t bother to look for long enough to see them trickle down his cheeks. Another hand settles over the soft bulge of his stomach, massaging over it. It might be slightly too rough, he thinks, a bit too forceful, but Jon doesn’t scream again. Elias cups his hands over his belly, pets, and then digs his hands into it again. 

“Oh, Jon,” he mumbles, “this really isn’t good.” He looks up at Jon’s tear-streaked face, his bloodshot eyes – those flaring gills, and oh, he thinks he can see a trickle of red now – “this really isn’t good at all.”

The fear in Jon’s eyes is palpable. It’s funny, Elias thinks, how he’d been so willing to bash himself against the tank walls for weeks, but the vague notion of death now makes him afraid enough to show it so blatantly, so openly. He presses down on Jon’s belly with the palm of one hand, the knuckles of the other, and watches as Jon’s face contorts in pain. He really is beautiful. 

“You know,” he says, hands settling into a rhythm not unlike kneading dough, “I think you’ve been having it too good –” he forces himself to go lighter, lighter – he doesn’t want to make him actually lose consciousness from the pain – “I think maybe these treats aren’t good for you.”

Jon nods tearfully. Elias’ hands go lighter, still, until it’s less of a massage and more of a light rubbing. Jon goes with it, limp, like a fish, like a doll, and what a beautiful doll does he make – eyes open, looking directly up at the ceiling (and Elias had had the lights installed in the vague pattern of stars – black ceiling and all those twinkling lights –), soft and pliant for Elias to move and position as he wants. 

“Good boy,” Elias says softly. “You’ll get fish again, tomorrow, alright? Treats really aren’t good for you, you know that.” 

Jon doesn’t nod, then, so Elias presses down on the next rubbing motion, heel of his hand digging in painfully, and Jon’s mouth opens in a pained gasp, and he nods, hard, fast. It’s a jerky motion, but Elias is going to let it slide, just this once. He bends down, mouth moving to kiss his belly. He’s cold and damp, the flesh underneath soft and giving, tender from his touch, and when his lips move over his sensitive skin Jon shudders. He’s crying again, Elias knows. 

He straightens up, then, hand moving back onto his belly. Jon wants to move away. It’s blatant in his body language – tail twitching as his head jerks to the side involuntarily at the first touch of his hand to his skin, and Elias smiles slightly. Silly thing. No idea what’s best for him. 

“Few more minutes,” he says. “Suck it up. There’s a reason I have to do this. I’d much rather not, you know that.”

And oh, but that isn’t true – there’s few things he loves more than getting to touch Jon like this. It’s not the main part, true, but the scarceness of opportunity to do this is what makes it better, what makes it so mouthwateringly satisfying, what makes him so unwilling to let go once he’s got a hand on his skin, his scales, his hair. 

Jon takes it, regardless. He keeps crying through it, although it’s mostly just tears sliding gently down his face. His chest doesn’t move much. Elias is rather glad about that, really – trying to do this while Jon sobs openly is much less fun, and he very much likes for him to lie still. All in all, it really could have been worse, he supposes. 

Just for fun, just to make sure, Elias moves one hand around his belly, the exposed, vulnerable parts of him, whatever organs he can find and tenderly press down on and feel without bone blocking his way. His understanding of anatomy is better than most. He’s had practice – if not on Jon, specifically, then in general – and it’s easy enough, pressing and poking and rolling each organ he can find with his hands alone, that he can pinpoint through Jon’s bluish skin, and through it all Jon holds still, muscles tense and rippling where they strain to keep still.

“Just making sure you’re alright,” he says, steel in his voice when Jon finally breaks and whimpers. He returns his hand to his belly regardless, the soft bulge and distension of it. Everything’s alright. It’s fascinating, really. Good, but fascinating – nothing broken within him, never has been, not even with everything he’s done to him. He wonders if he could press a hand underneath his ribs from the bottom of his ribcage, feel whatever’s underneath move and pulse under his hands. 

He could, of course. 

Not today, though. Not tonight. 

“Feel better?” he asks eventually. Jon’s face has taken a vaguely purple tint, eyes glassy. It might be oxygen deprivation, he supposes, but it’s more likely it’s just the pain. He nods, anyway, obedient. Elias doesn’t bother to point out the way he tries to curl up again. He supposes it might just be because he’s worried Elias will try to touch him again and that it’ll hurt. Hand shy, he thinks, he’d known this might happen, and he’s willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s feeling benevolent. 

“Put him back,” he says after a few seconds of thought. Enough for the night, he thinks. Too much of a good thing can be bad, he knows. He’s watching the consequences of overindulgence first hand; shivering and gasping in front of him, laid out on the cold examination table, the smooth metal of it dabbled with the blood still dripping from Jon’s gills.

The gloves come off with the snap of latex against skin. The men start approaching Jon, and Elias turns him back to walk back down the steps without bothering to watch them throw him back into the tank. He wonders if he’ll find him curled up on the bottom of the tank in the morning again. It’s possible, he supposes. The belly rubs might help. They might not. Hard to say.

It doesn’t matter, he thinks. If he does, he will just have to repeat the treatment, and Elias Bouchard has never been afraid to get his hands dirty.


End file.
